Hacker News: uolmir

New comment by uolmir in "Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design"

uolmir — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:36:00 +0000

This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.

New comment by uolmir in "Demystifying Tufte's data-ink ratio"

uolmir — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 05:27:46 +0000

I agree. I think Tufte has good aesthetic judgement and is often right in his criticism of why certain examples of visual data presentation are flawed. But a researcher on this subject he is not.

To your question, I recommend this recent review as one good example: https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006211051956

New comment by uolmir in "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back"

uolmir — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 02:05:27 +0000

Aerospace is very good. I'm not some tiling pro but it's been working perfectly for me for a year or so. Such an improvement over just using spaces on macos.

FY2025 NASA Planetary Research and Analysis Funding Cut by More Than 50%

uolmir — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:01:36 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.planetary-research.org/2026/09/25/ra_funding_cut_50percent_fy2025/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880157

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by uolmir in "“I just chose words carefully”"

uolmir — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 23:35:06 +0000

He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.

New comment by uolmir in "'We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs'"

uolmir — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:44:27 +0000

So elves in dwarf fortress.

New comment by uolmir in "All Look Same?"

uolmir — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:26:42 +0000

Seriously. I remember distinctly playing with this in 2004-5.

Interference Pattern Formed in a Finger Gap Is Not Single Slit Diffraction

uolmir — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 03:28:47 +0000

Article URL: https://note.com/hydraenids/n/nbe89030deaba

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998580

Points: 95

# Comments: 12

New comment by uolmir in "What an unprocessed photo looks like"

uolmir — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 23:44:03 +0000

This is a great write up. It's also weirdly similar to a video I happened upon yesterday playing around with raw Hubble imagery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gBXSQCWdSI

He take a few minutes to get to the punch line. Feel free to skip ahead to around 5:30.

New comment by uolmir in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

uolmir — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 03:50:41 +0000

I know what you mean by your comment, but you might want to give catch 22 another try sometime. I'd say that the start with the Texan is far from the best the book gets. Reading it, I think you'll find Yossarian more and more understandable and the situations more and more bleakly comic as you go.

Or don't. There's no end of great novels out there.

New comment by uolmir in "High school student discovers 1.5M potential new astronomical objects"

uolmir — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:03:06 +0000

Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.

New comment by uolmir in "NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months"

uolmir — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:34:41 +0000

Everywhere? This is a crazy thing to claim. I was also recently in Japan and I never took a car anywhere. I'm sure there are particular routes that are badly served but come on.

Mick Jagger. Rolling Stone. Cultural icon. And cricket streaming pioneer

uolmir — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:54:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6789244/2025/11/26/mick-jagger-rolling-stone-cultural-icon-and-cricket-streaming-pioneer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46058651

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by uolmir in "No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off"

uolmir — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 04:58:17 +0000

> In fact up until a recent funding method change from the Trump Administration, most grant money was subject to "overhead"--a nebulous nonsensical accounting trick that allowed the university administration to get upwards of 60% of the dollars that are earmarked for grants.

We're better than this here. Don't spread misinformation. First of all overhead is listed as a percentage, such as 55% or 60% or whatever but the university doesn't get that fraction of the total grant. You work up the so called direct costs, ie the line item salaries of the researchers, the reagents, etc. and then the overhead is 60% of that figure. So it would work out to be 38% of the total dollars granted.

It's also not a trick. It's a negotiated amount that is supposed to avoid each grant requesting some amortized fraction of the cost of office space and other necessary but shared expenses.

I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.

New comment by uolmir in "CCTV footage captures the first-ever video of an earthquake fault in motion"

uolmir — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 19:32:29 +0000

Although that land would have already been under water.

New comment by uolmir in "The last step in a long process on “arsenic life”"

uolmir — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 19:48:47 +0000

Important context to be found in the reporting on this saga, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/science/arseniclife-retra....

In short, the authors and NASA strongly disagree with the decision to retract and argue that this is clearly outside of the typical norms for what retraction is supposed to represent. A paper being wrong isn't and shouldn't be the standard for retraction, particularly in this case when the original paper was published with multiple technical responses and rejoinders.

New comment by uolmir in "What's happening to reading?"

uolmir — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 21:54:49 +0000

One of the best! If memory serves there was a This American Life segment excerpted from it too (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/195/transcript).

New comment by uolmir in "NIH will eliminate many peer review panels, lay off scientists overseeing them"

uolmir — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:43:50 +0000

From the article this seems much less bad than the headline might imply. This idea predates trump and it does not eliminate scientific review of proposals. That said, whether the cost savings itself is worth what might be a diminishment in review quality is hard to say. I can only comment from the NSF side of things to say that peer review of proposals is a mixed bag and will unavoidably run into human error and individual predispositions regarding scientific importance so maybe this isn't a bad approach to try.

New comment by uolmir in "Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal"

uolmir — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:12:50 +0000

There have been several of these deep dives into manipulated speed runs and they seldom disappoint. Since we are on HN, I'll mention another mathy one that was summarized by Matt Parker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU

New comment by uolmir in "Her Discovery Wasn't Alien Life, but Science Has Never Been the Same"

uolmir — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 23:29:02 +0000

Reflections on science in the internet age and a debate on the meaning and appropriate use of retraction.